Offer Goals

Last Modified October 30, 2018|
Originally Posted May 23, 2014

The offer goals feature is a powerful way to track multiple conversion points in a single offer. It also provides the option of paying affiliates for different actions that occur after the user clicks the tracking link.

Using offer goals, you can track: leads and sales for an offer, downloads and installs, free signups and paid subscriptions, or other payout structures you might want. Many networks use offer goals to track the performance of their advertising funnels, or to reward affiliates by offering payouts for users fulfilling certain objectives.

Use Case

You are selling a product online and want to pay affiliates 20% of the sales you make, but you also have upgrades on the product, complementary products, and even a newsletter subscription. You can track these actions as separate events that are all tied to one offer.

For example, you can set a goal such that when a user clicks an affiliate tracking link and signs up for the newsletter, you will pay the affiliate $1. Then if the user continues to purchase the product, you can additionally pay the affiliate 20% of the sale price.

Setting Up Offer Goals

Setting up an offer goal requires just a few changes to your settings. Many options are available for offer goals as well, including the ability to provide payouts or keep the offer goal private.

Step 1: Enable Network-Wide Goals Setting

To add goals to offers, you first need to enable them network-wide. Go to Company > Customize Application > Settings > Offers. Find the “Offer Goals” setting, and set it to “Enabled”. Click Save once you’re finished. Now you can create goals on individual offers in your network.

Step 2: Enable Goals for an Offer

To enable goals for an existing offer, first go to the offer’s page. In the Payout panel, click the Edit button. On the following page, set Multiple Conversion Goals to “Enabled”. Click Save once you’re finished.

Tip: When creating a new offer, you can enable goals by setting Multiple Conversion Goals to “Enabled” in the “Goals” card.

Step 3: Add Goals to an Offer

Once goals are enabled on an offer, click Add Goal in the top right of the Payout section of an offer’s page. Like creating a new offer, setting up a new goal auto-generates a new conversion link.

Fill out the form provided for the new goal. If you would like to keep this goal private or pay affiliates for this goal, do so here.

Place Goal Tracking Pixels

Once a goal is created, you will be provided three different conversion tracking links depending on how you want the goal to be reported in the system. Select the conversion tracking link if you would like the completion of the goal to show as a conversion or select the click pixel if you only want it to show as a click. Place conversion links on the page that represents the completion of a specific goal. Sub IDs and sale amounts can be passed following the same methods as all other conversion pixels.

Goal Postback URLs

If you use postback tracking, your postback URLs take a slightly different form than normal. They all take the following form, with the highlighted part showing what differs from a regular postback:

You can find each goal’s specific URL from that goal’s page. You can also replace the goal_id parameter in the postback URL if you know the ID of your goal.

Goal Settings

Goal settings are set when a goal is created. They can also be edited and updated by viewing a goal and clicking the “Edit” link on the corresponding panel.

Status

“Active” means the goal is active. If the goal isn’t private and status is active, then affiliates can see the goal. If the goal is old or no longer used, set the goal to “Deleted”.

Private Goals

You can also make a goal private to track only the revenue generated when a user completes a specified action. This is helpful for recording data to be used internally, as it provides more information about user activity in the advertising funnel.

If a goal is private, payouts are not tracked. Affiliates do not have access to private goals. Additionally, you can’t set custom affiliate payouts or place third-party affiliate pixels/URLs.

Note: When setting a goal to Private, first remove payout values. If a payout is set and saved before the goal is made private, then the payout doesn’t get zero’ed out—it is just hidden. Conversions on the goal will still show a payout value based on what you had previously entered.

Conversion Tracking

Image and iframe conversion pixels use client-based cookie or cookieless tracking while Server Postback uses server-based cookieless tracking URLs. When using server postback tracking for goals, keep in mind that you must pass a transaction ID on the click to the landing page so that the value can be passed on to the offer postback goal.

Goal Reference ID

The goal reference ID is a static value that you can place to be passed through to an affiliates pixel/postback on goal conversion. This can be passed with the {goal_ref} macro.

Revenue

The amount paid by advertisers per conversion. You can set this to $0 if you only want to track payouts for a goal. Otherwise, setting the revenue will allow you to see the difference in income from an offer and the cost to run the offer on your affiliate network.

Payout

The amount paid to affiliates per conversion. Set a goal to private if you do not want to compensate the affiliate for the goal.

Tiered Revenues and Payouts

When setting the payout and revenue for the offer goal, you can opt to enable payout and revenue tiers. When goals are enabled, you can set the payout tiers by selecting Edit on the default goal and enabling the tiered payouts/revenues. For additional goals, you enable and set payout tiers in the “Payout” link for that goal. If the payout tier is not enabled, then the system will revert to the default payout for the goal.

Multiple Conversions

Enable multiple conversions to be recorded per user for only one active session. An active session is created each time a user clicks on a tracking link. This will allow a user to create multiple conversions for this goal.

End Point

Enabling this setting will close the active session when this goal is converted. This prevents the user from further converting on the offer unless another active session is started. Set this to enabled on the last goal in the flow process. Only additional goals can be set as an end point, the default goal cannot be set as an end point.

Approve Conversions

Enable “Approve Conversions” to require each conversion for this goal to be approved. Conversions will be set to ‘pending’ by default and will be excluded from billing and stats until approved.

Encrypted Conversion Tracking

Enable “Encrypted Conversion Tracking” to enforce conversion tracking pixels to only record conversions from pixels that are encrypted. Disable this feature to dynamically create conversion tracking pixels and URLs based on the offer ID.

Manage Offer Goals

Manage your offers goals at anytime by clicking the “Manage” link on the Payout panel. This will show you each goal associated with an offer including data such as ID, Name, Status, Advertiser, Tracking Pixel Type, Endpoint, Private, Allow Multiples, Payout, and Revenue. From here you can View, Edit, or adjust Payout for each goal by clicking the appropriate link in the right most column.

Private Goals

Keeping goals private allows you to collect user data on your sales process without paying affiliates for each action or recording each action as a conversion. This is extremely useful for learning about bounce rates and about users that abort the sales process. If you are creating a new goal, toggle the “Private” setting to “Enabled”.

If you want to make an existing goal private, select the goal in the Payout panel on the offer’s page and click Edit in the upper right of the Details panel. Then, set “Private” to “Enabled”.

When goals are private, affiliates cannot view them in the conversion report, and are usually implemented for tracking internal metrics. Because of this, private goals will do not have a payout value, only a revenue value can be entered.

Custom Goal Payouts for Affiliates

Quickly edit the payouts for specific affiliates on specific goals on an offer’s page by clicking Affiliate Payouts in the Payout panel. The Offer Affiliate Settings page allows you to add custom payouts by clicking Add in the upper right. Select the affiliate by using the toggle, select the goal, and fill in the form below including the payout. Click the Add button to create the custom payout.

You can edit these payouts at any time by selecting the “Affiliate Payouts” tab on the Payout panel. There, you can make changes for all affiliates with custom payouts.